Clodagh Finn: The ‘Irish matchgirl’ who helped to change history

Mary Driscoll was just 14 years old when she began helping women in London fight against appalling working conditions and serious health risks posed by the use of phosphorous in factories 

‘Matchgirl’ strikers, several showing early symptoms of phossy jaw, a form of bone cancer that affects the jaw, teeth, gum and face. It can also lead to brain damage.

The name Mary Driscoll might not ring a bell but this woman, considered the “lowest of the low” in her society, was just 14 years old when she became one of the leaders of a strike among match-factory employees that helped improve working conditions for everyone.

And yes, isn’t there something linguistically satisfying about hearing of a strike by matchwomen? They really did strike a light — “using sisterhood and long hatpins!” — to borrow some choice phrases from historian Louise Raw’s fascinating book on the stoppage by workers at the Bryant & May match factory in 1888.

The anniversary fell earlier this week, a reminder of that extraordinary day in July 135 years ago when 1,400 workers walked out of the East End factory in London to protest against the appalling working conditions and serious health risks posed by the use of phosphorous.

The poisonous fumes emitted from phosphorous during the production process caused ‘phossy jaw’, a form of bone cancer that affects the jaw, teeth, gum, and face. It can also lead to brain damage.

In June 1888, journalist Annie Besant wrote of the inhumane conditions at the match factory in her weekly newspaper The Link. She said workers were often still children — “undersized because under-fed”— who were flung aside when spent because all Bryant & May cared about was that shareholders got their 23%.

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“Girls,” she wrote, “are used to carry boxes on their heads until the hair is rubbed off and the young heads are bald at fifteen years of age.”

In an attempt to salvage its reputation, the company tried to force employees to sign a statement saying working conditions were adequate. When they refused, a number of women were fired to make a point. The employees, most of them female and many of them of Irish descent, had had enough.

Strike

Mary Driscoll was one of the strike leaders who encouraged fellow workers — including her sister Margaret (Mog) and her mother Elizabeth, from Cork — to down tools in protest. By July 6, the whole factory had stopped working.

The company offered to reinstate the fired workers, but by then the strikers’ demands had grown. They wanted better working conditions and an end to the fines that were imposed for talking, or going to the toilet without permission. George Bernard Shaw was among those who helped to set up a strike fund, but the workers also helped each other. 

The writers of Toilers in London, a study of female labour in the city, were very impressed by that solidarity, saying the matchwomen stood together at all costs: “‘I can pawn this for you’, ‘I’ll lend you that’, in every direction, girls might be seen plotting how they could help one another on until Bryant and May gave them back their pennies.”

While some newspapers railed against it, the strike attracted huge public interest.

As Dr Louise Raw, author of Striking a Light: The Matchwomen and their Place in History, puts it: “The strike had it all: an almost fairy-tale-like struggle between rich, powerful factory owners, and desperately poor workers with all the photogenic waif-likeness of Hans Christian Andersen’s martyred Little Match Girl, a staple of the Victorian nursery.

The strikers also earned the dubious accolade of being threatened by the serial killer ‘Jack the Ripper’, or someone claiming to be him.

Two weeks later, the employers gave in and granted the workers’ demands, although they did not stop using phosphorous until a decade later. The strike, however, had sparked — if you’ll forgive the pun — a nascent labour movement, encouraging dockers to strike the following year.

“The [women] didn’t stop there,” writes Dr Raw, “but recruited women from jam factories and confectionery works at meetings with tea and cake and Irish music. These were the mothers of the entire modern labour movement, and Labour Party.”

These women might have been working long hours in awful conditions, but they had a cast-iron sense of their own identity. They were known for their spirit and their high-heeled boots, colourful hats, and long hatpins which, as one East End resident said, they did not hesitate to use to defend themselves.

Mary Driscoll

It is clear that Mary Driscoll had a very strong sense of herself too. Born to Irish parents (Patrick Driscoll from Kerry and Elizabeth, née Cunningham from Skibbereen) on 14 January 1874, she was imbued with self-respect from the start. She made a point of standing up straight and insisted her children and grandchildren did the same.

Her granddaughter Joan Harris remembers her telling them, time and again: “Always hold your head up. Remember you’re as good as anyone.” She certainly needed all the self-belief she could muster because life presented many challenges. 

Today, as it happens, is her wedding anniversary. She married dock worker Thomas Foster on this day in 1894. Who knows what goes on inside a marriage, but relatives spoke of her husband’s heavy drinking and his propensity towards violence.

To support her family, Mary took in washing and went hop-picking during the summers. She had 11 children, but only five survived. She was pregnant when her husband died in a docks accident in 1916, and had to cope with the loss of her son, William, to Spanish Flu two years later.

Life, however, started to get a little bit easier around that time when she somehow gathered the capital — perhaps from compensation after her husband’s death — to open up two small businesses: a cat food shop and a corn dealer’s shop on Parnham Street. 

While she never learned to read or write, she was an astute businesswoman. Her granddaughter Joan Harris said: “She could always tell you down to the last penny what was in the tills in either shop.”

Mary Driscoll was also a woman who was proud of her Irish heritage. She was a nationalist and had portraits of Robert Emmet and Michael Collins in her house.

She was also a firm believer and, once during the London Blitz in 1940, she braved an intense air raid so that she could find a Catholic church to baptise her newborn grandchild. She found one too.

'Mothers of the labour movement'

Mary Driscoll and the other “mothers of the labour movement” will be celebrated next weekend at the Matchwomen's Festival in London. “They were a very cool girl gang,” says Louise Raw, director of the festival, historian, and author of the book that fleshed out the identities of these women for the first time.

“They gave hope and inspiration to hundreds of thousands of desperately exploited workers and should, I believe, be acknowledged as the mothers of modern British trade unionism.”

Closer to home, we are gearing up to celebrate the Mother Jones Festival in memory of Mary Harris, the formidable Cork-born labour activist whose famous catchcry was: “Pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living”.

She is now quite well-known — and rightly so — but there was another pioneering Cork woman who once worked with her who is almost forgotten.

Stay tuned.